Don't Ask, Don't Tell
by gagethemage
Summary: Gus' POV on life with Brian


Of course I don't own Queer as Folk. I bid for it on Ebay, but didn't win. Which is why it's the miserable mess it is at the moment, I might add. The below is a small ficlet from Gus' point of view some years in the future.  
  
Don't Ask, Don't Tell  
  
There were rules wherever you went, and if you wanted to survive you played by the rules. You didn't have to like them; you didn't have to agree with them. But you had to obey them. And you could take comfort in that; if you did what you were supposed to do, you pretty much knew what you could expect.  
  
Not always. Sometimes you could do everything right and still have the rug yanked out from under you. You could be sitting at your desk taking notes, all of 11 years old, and thinking about what you wanted to watch on television that night. And then suddenly they call your name, telling you to come to the office right away because 2/3 of your world happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. And because someone didn't follow the rules; someone got wasted and drove anyway, 2/3 of your world were gone forever.  
  
And then you find yourself living with someone you've known your entire life, and who more than anyone else is still a stranger to you. Who remains a stranger four years later.  
  
There were simple rules here; ones that were easy enough to follow. Home by 11 unless you called first. Homework before television. No leaving a mess in the kitchen.  
  
Then there the other rules. The ones they never talked about.  
  
You didn't touch or taste or tamper with any of the little packages or vials you might happen to find lying scattered around the apartment at any given time.  
  
You stayed away from the tricks, after the one cornered you in the bathroom when you were twelve. You still had nightmares about that sometimes, although when you cried out for help, help came immediately. You never mentioned the fact that no tricks were brought to the apartment for a long time after that, not until a few months ago, when it was apparently judged that you were big enough to handle yourself if anyone ever tried to hurt you again.  
  
You didn't talk about your mothers, especially your biological mother. At least not with him. That was what Debbie was for, or Uncle Michael, and he was cool with that. You could talk to them until your tongue fell out. But if you said to him "Mom used to say that." or "Mama taught me that" all you got was a quick change of subject and a warning glance telling you not to break the rules again.  
  
You didn't talk about how worried you were sometimes when he didn't come home at night; how you would lie away in your bed, staring at the ceiling, listening for the sound of his key in the lock. How a part of you was always terrified that he would not be coming back, that he was going to leave you as well.  
  
You pretended not to notice the way he looked at you sometimes, his eyes full of love and pride and fear. You pretended not to know that sometimes he laid in his own bed scared to death of losing you.  
  
You didn't ask "Do you love me?" You didn't need to; he expected you to know. You knew that if you had needed to ask, he probably would have said yes, but he would have been hurt. Terribly hurt. Didn't he give you everything you wanted? Hadn't he rearranged his life to raise you? What more proof of love could you need from him?  
  
You did not say "I love you" to him.  
  
You accepted that he would give you as much as he could; that you had to learn to live without what he could not. He was not a god, although once upon a time you had believed him to be so. He was simply a man who lived with the choices he had made in his life, who pretended no regrets of those choices.  
  
And you accepted him because you knew that you were not a choice he regretted making. You didn't burden him with your own worries and problems because he carried far too many of his own. You loved him more than anything in the world.  
  
And tried to ignore the part of you that hated him. 


End file.
